Jay-Z and Reckoning With Power

What does it mean to love a (billionaire) artist’s craft when you hate billionaires?

I spent March 24th overjoyed that I’m seeing Jay-Z in concert multiple times this summer, and outraged at his GQ interview. Hip-hop is an all-powerful cultural force, but in the major label orbit, it’s devolved into a commercial for how inconsiderate the pursuit of money and power can get among artists who will never attain the infrastructural might of their overseers anyway. Jay-Z, perhaps more than any artist, embodies that complication. Jay-Z fandom acknowledges that he’s one of the game’s most undeniable storytellers and lyricists, while ruing that he compulsively sold us the dream of Black excellence to fatten his pockets while rarely reciprocating to amplify working-class struggle.

It’s about wanting to hear a new album, but knowing that more songs like “4:44” and “A.P.I.D.T.A.” will be in between a minefield of lyrics shaming poor people for not being independent and pushing back against valid class criticisms with pithy one-liners. It’s about coming to realize that if I’m to believe that he was a mid-level (or higher) drug dealer who sold drugs to his community for profit, then he’s probably not above being the cleanup man for Brooklyn developers looking to displace Black communities in Prospect Heights, and the NFL when it sought a distraction from blackballing Colin Kaepernick. It’s acknowledging that lines like “I’m a business…man” encapsulate his gift for wordplay, while conceding that his brand of business calls for Bitcoin schools for Brooklynites with more pressing basic needs, “debt-free scholarships” that actually costs students thousands, “gentrifying your own hood,” and apps that help the government track parolees.